Blu-Ray format doomed?

[SQUACKEE]

Blu-Ray players start at $399.00 and the disks are expensive. You can buy a DVD player with "up-convert" for as little as $49.00 that produce a picture that is described as "HD like". Ive seen it and its damn fine.

The DVD up-converts are soon going to be replaced with a new player according to the salesman i talked to. I assume it will be even better than the up-convert and cost less than Blu-ray. Blu-ray better come down in price or they will only be bought by audio-philes.

[guru]

When Toshiba killed it's HD DVD format a few months ago it pretty much set up Blu-Ray with no competition.

[donley2]

When Toshiba killed it's HD DVD format a few months ago it pretty much set up Blu-Ray with no competition.

As the new High definition format you are correct, Blu-Ray is the choice. But Squakee's point is still vaild. The real competition for Blu-Ray is standard DVD's. Most think Blu-Ray will eventually become mainstream but it will be many years. Only 25% of households or so own high definition tv's and around only half of those actually get high definition content via pay services or over the air. The current potential market for Blu-Ray at present is almost certainly somewhere less than 10% of the overall market.

[SQUACKEE]

When Toshiba killed it's HD DVD format a few months ago it pretty much set up Blu-Ray with no competition.

True at the time, but i believe a new player is coming out soon which will be "just" as good for far less, well see.

[dakota]

Broadband is making the whole format war obsolete.

[Half Miler]

FWIW, I own a both an upscaler and a blu-ray player and notice quite a bit of difference between blu-ray discs and standard DVDs that have been upscaled.

[donley2]

FWIW, I own a both an upscaler and a blu-ray player and notice quite a bit of difference between blu-ray discs and standard DVDs that have been upscaled.

What size and resolution TV do you have? How close do you sit?

[Cooter Brown]

Broadband is making the whole format war obsolete.

Exactly. The standard DVD will be last truly successful hard copy media.

I rent HD movies on-demand from Time Warner all the time. the quality is fantastic. Once fiber optic is more commonplace and it can handle a library of 10,000+ HD movies each rented for $4/24 hours...DVDs, Blockbuster, Netflix, etc are history.

[SQUACKEE]

Broadband is making the whole format war obsolete.

Exactly. The standard DVD will be last truly successful hard copy media.

I rent HD movies on-demand from Time Warner all the time. the quality is fantastic. Once fiber optic is more commonplace and it can handle a library of 10,000+ HD movies each rented for $4/24 hours...DVDs, Blockbuster, Netflix, etc are history.

I buy movies in HD on direct tv satelite and save them to the hard drive. The only problem is space. I can save 100 hours -about 45 movies.

[Cooter Brown]

I buy movies in HD on direct tv satelite and save them to the hard drive. The only problem is space. I can save 100 hours -about 45 movies.

you should look at getting a 1TB Buffalo NAS drive for your house. They cost around $500. You just have to plug it into a network (ethernet or wireless router) and you can access all your digital media. I have a network in my house and I'm going to get one so I can convert 1200 CDs to MP3s so I can access them on my stereo instantly. You would just have to buy a device that can plug into your TV and stream the movies from the drive. I'm probably getting a Squeezebox receiver for music but I'm sure there's a device that does movies also.

[Half Miler]

FWIW, I own a both an upscaler and a blu-ray player and notice quite a bit of difference between blu-ray discs and standard DVDs that have been upscaled.

What size and resolution TV do you have? How close do you sit?

Panasonic Viera 42" Plasma, 1080p.
I sit pretty close, admittedly, probably about 4 ft away.

I've heard that PS3 units do a better job at upscaling, but I don't own one.

The simple fact is that upscaling from a lower res is akin to enlarging an image in Photoshop. You only have a certain amount of pixels (or lines) to begin with, so stretching them, or filling in missing space with 'similar' colors, does not make up for missing pixels.

[Spiritual Warrior]

DVD's were pretty expensive when they first came out. I didn't touch em' for the first few years. And it look's exactly like Blue-Ray right now.

One Blue-Ray disc holds 25GB WOW!!! and that's only single layer.

And Blue-Ray reads and writes DVD.

Wait a few years and they will be reasonable to buy.

You can still buy a laptop with an offered 1.44 floppy drive. This is really just for booting purposes. Before long this will disappear.

In time when Blue-Ray is inexpensive, like DVD is now, you won't even miss the DVD, because there will be another format to take Blue-Ray's place.

Remember when we had 33 rpm records. It wasn't that long ago.

SW

[bad hammy]

There is always something on the horizon. I bought into CDs back in 1984 (the original Sony Discman). The next year (1985) I was at a party where a woman with a connection to a record company said that CDs were soon to be obsolete because they would be recording stuff on devices the size of a credit card. She was right, but soon was relative - the iPod was introduced in 2001. In the meantime I had 17 years of CD fun before worrying about the next generation tech.

[tandfman]

Remember when we had 33 rpm records. It wasn't that long ago.

I still have about a thousand of them. And I still play some of them.

[26mi235]

DVD's were pretty expensive when they first came out. I didn't touch em' for the first few years. And it look's exactly like Blue-Ray right now.

One Blue-Ray disc holds 25GB WOW!!! and that's only single layer.

And Blue-Ray reads and writes DVD.

Wait a few years and they will be reasonable to buy.

You can still buy a laptop with an offered 1.44 floppy drive. This is really just for booting purposes. Before long this will disappear.

In time when Blue-Ray is inexpensive, like DVD is now, you won't even miss the DVD, because there will be another format to take Blue-Ray's place.

Remember when we had 33 rpm records. It wasn't that long ago.

SW

Even when they were being developed these two formats were far from the densest DVD format, I think. I think I remember a competing format (not playing the same applications) that was several times more compact, probably about 100GB or possibly several hundred.